


To Sleep, Perchance...

by Oreramar



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Drabbles, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, character exploration, introspective, thematic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 12:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7463217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oreramar/pseuds/Oreramar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody has their own dreams, and by the same token, their own nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Sleep, Perchance...

This one dreams of home.

Once, ‘home’ was simple, and even if his sleeping mind warped it he could still recognize it in the shapes left intact.

Now, it is more complex. Now there is his first home, his longest, and it is warm photo-plated hallways melded into clean white corridors lit with crystal blue blended with the cockpit of a ship that is part of him, linked to him. Now he wanders in his dreams from the sunlit beach straight into a wide control room with walls of windows filled with a vast starry void, and the posters in his bedroom have become holographic display screens and his bed is a pilot’s chair, and people he knows are everywhere they should and should not be, and they all belong.

Now his nightmares are the slow, vague, unsettling realization that he can’t find one part of his home or the other. Either the cold white corridors stretch on endlessly, dropping into empty space, or he is left with sand scorching his feet, blistering off-white paint from the walls. He searches either of these for the other, looking for home, knowing that home is too far away to reach, knowing also that he already _is_ home, but it’s not complete as just one, it should be both now, and it terrifies him because how can he possibly bring these two things together, limited sedentary planet life and the vast mobile reaches of space?

All he wants is home.

 

-

 

This one dreams of family.

Once, dreams were other things altogether. This changed with a phone call, a news broadcast, a single moment that tore her world in two.

Then her dreams were of discovery or denial - they are found, they’re coming home, they were here all along and reality was the dream after all. In time, other faces began to appear in these reunions, unquestioned in their belonging - her family was no longer four, but eight, nine, ten strong, and they all were safe and happy and loved her and each other.

But in her nightmares, they were cut in half and half and half again - ten then five then two and finally just one. The phone calls and news broadcasts didn’t make sense, couldn’t, what mission could _they_ have possibly flown without _her_ , she was part of this crew, it was all wrong but she could never ever stop it, stuck on the ground while they went up into the sky and disappeared and everyone around her said they were gone forever. She collected them, drew them close, and they drifted like soap bubbles and lost balloons, out of her reach before she realized how high they had gone, and however she calls and cries out they do not come back to her.

All she wants is her family.

 

-

 

This one dreams of peace.

Once this simply meant quiet and ease, time spent without motion or chaos or risk. He dreamt of food, cooking and eating alike, warm rain and trade winds and no pressing need to go or to do, no struggle and no discomfort.

This has since become dreams washed with a fierce protective joy in seeing galaxies, worlds, people standing in the free air, smiling and laughing and without conflict. It’s dreaming of an empire laying down their weapons, and himself and his friends putting theirs down in turn, going among once-enemies without armor, without fear, the lions no longer mighty machines but simple cats playing together in the flowers and the grass.

And in the nightmares, the clouds grow dark and the people afraid, abashed, angry, and the enemy is still the enemy and is still armed, but his lion is a kitten and his armor is gone, and for all that he wants to stop fighting he knows he must, but he cannot without the weapons he had abandoned and cannot find again, and the knowledge fills him with echoes of the sickness he thought himself over because he is watching his friends fight and fight and fight their way into becoming shadows of war, as unable to lay down their arms as the enemy is unwilling, and without him they have no leg to stand on and he _needs_ to find the weapons he put down but _all he wants_ …

All he wants is peace.

 

-

 

This one dreams of strength.

Once this meant standing for himself, alone and mighty and unchallenged by the world, strength to pull back what was lost, to force those who denied the truth to see it at last.

He still dreams of strength and speed of arm, of victories won and contests bested, but in his dreams he is no longer alone. His dreams tell him that though he might not need their help, he has it, and there is a surprising comfort in that as he topples automated Galra opponents in training rooms or tears through hulls of battleships with his claws, because someone else is always there and although they too are strong enough to stand alone they want him there as well.

And then his dreams turn, and he is huge and powerful, claws and teeth and blade, and the only thing against him, between him and victory, is something pathetically small…but it is not weak. It should be the work of a moment to crush this opponent, but try as he might everything goes wrong, and all his strength drains away in strike after ineffectual strike until it is the other that is huge and powerful and poised to crush him like an insect, and in a flash he knows that the others have not come, will not come, because while he was fighting (losing) here they were without him and without him, without his arm, they too were lost.

All he wants is strength.

 

-

 

This one dreams of freedom.

Once this merely meant flying through a wide sky or countless stars, either with controls under his hands and a cockpit around his head or else with the heady swooping sensation of free, open flight without the need of wings.

Now the two are muddled, controls and cockpit and no need for a winged machine, for he is the machine himself, and they are unfettered, free to be where they wish and do what they choose and fight for their own chosen cause.

Now, the good dreams end there, brief and seldom experienced, because the nightmares are strong and many, and so frequently in them he locks up, trapped in his own body, lion and man alike, unable to move as the enemy comes, seizes him, forces him to watch as the others fall one by one. He locks up or is locked, looks into glowing yellow eyes set in his own sharply grinning face, and understands that _this_ is what destroyed them, that they were all killed by a form they thought they could trust. He locks up or is locked, and his body moves under another’s direction, a puppet on their strings as he screams inside his own head, watching as the hand they forced on him tears apart everything he has come to love, still fighting the enemy’s battles for the enemy’s dark amusement. But the blood on the sand is not now that of some thuggish alien set against him in the ring, it’s that of friends, family, who stared at him in fear, confusion, betrayal, anger as he spilled it, and no matter how he screams for release, the enemy’s hand marches him onward, back to their iron grasp, closer and tighter now that he has escaped them once, and just as it closes he wakes up gasping, drenched in sweat and tears.

All he wants is freedom.

 

-

 

This one dreams of unity.

Once, she hardly had to dream at all. It is there in her youngest, furthest memories, bright and shining. Now she is not sure if that was reality or simply the naïve outlook of a child new to the universe. Nevertheless, once it is lost in her eyes her dreams carry her back to those times.

They still do, sometimes, but now it is closer, deeper, more personal. She dreams back into existence all that she has lost, and to it she adds all that she has since gained, and she makes it all as one in her mind, the best of the old and the best of the new in harmony, and all the worst forgotten or erased or made good again.

Her nightmares shatter her dreams into crystal shards, scattered across the floor, never to be pieced together again. She tries; faced with the mounting pressure of fear and the desperate desire not to lose anything again, she kneels in the glass and gathers it close, but there are so many conflicting colors and materials and shapes that she cannot begin to guess how it all ever fit together in the first place, or if she is looking at the wreckage of more than one union mixed into scrambled, tangled heaps on the floor, heaps suddenly to vast and widespread to have possibly come from a single shape, a single unit. All she knows is that she must reassemble it all or else entire swaths will be lost forever, and that she is fast running out of time.

All she wants is unity.

 

-

 

This one dreams in memories.

Perhaps he always has. He dreamt ten thousand years, memories and fancies of the mind blending together into seamless wholes. Sometimes, even when he wakes, he’s not quite sure which parts were real memories and which parts are simply memories of his dreams, or if there is a distinction to make at all.

His memories and dreams can sometimes be silly things. Other times, they are viewscreens full of fire, death, the destruction of an entire world and a monster promising that theirs would follow, his king making one last request of him, both of them knowing they may never see each other again, should things go badly (and so many things could go badly, and they did). He does his best to wrest control of these dreams back, to return to flowered fields and burning rockfalls.

Memories are all he has left.


End file.
